Podcast appearances and mentions of richard bruns

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Progress links digest, 2023-11-24: Bottlenecks of aging, Starship launches, and much more, published by jasoncrawford on November 25, 2023 on LessWrong. I swear I will get back to doing these weekly so they're not so damn long. As always, feel free to skim and skip around! The Progress Forum A paradox at the heart of American bureaucracy: "The quickest way to doom a project to be over-budget and long-delayed is to make it an urgent public priority" Why Governments Can't be Trusted to Protect the Long-run Future: "No one in the long-run future gets to vote in the next election. No one in government today will gain anything if they make the world better 50 years from now or lose anything if they make it worse" What if we split the US into city-states? "In The Republic, when his entourage asks the ideal size of a state, Socrates replies, 'I would allow the state to increase so far as is consistent with unity; that, I think, is the proper limit'" The Art of Medical Progress: "These two paintings offer a hopeful contrast. Whereas we begin with pain and suffering, we move to hope and progress. The surgeon stands apart as a hero, a symbol of the triumphant conquering of nature by humanity" More from Roots of Progress fellows Bottlenecks of Aging, a "philanthropic menu" of initiatives that "could meaningfully accelerate the advancement of aging science and other life-extending technologies." Fellows Alex Telford and Raiany Romanni both contributed to this (via @jamesfickel) Drought is a policy choice: "California has surrendered to drought, presupposing that with climate change water shortages are inevitable. In response, the state fallows millions of farmland each year. But this is ignorant of California's history of taming arid lands" Geoengineering Now! "Solar geoengineering can offset every degree of anthropogenic temperature rise for single-digit billions of dollars" (by @MTabarrok) A conversation with Richard Bruns on indoor air quality (and some very feasible ways to improve it) (@finmoorhouse) To Become a World-Class Chipmaker, the United States Might Need Help (NYT) covers a recent immigration proposal co-authored by (@cojobrien). Also, thread from @cojobrien of "what I've written through this program and some of my favorite pieces from other ROP colleagues" Opportunities Job opportunities Forest Neurotech is hiring, "one of the coolest projects in the world" says @elidourado "Know someone who loves to scale and automate workflows in the lab? We want to apply new tools to onboard a diverse array of species in the lab!" (@seemaychou) The Navigation Fund (new philanthropic foundation) is hiring an Open Science Program Officer (via @seemaychou, @AGamick) ARIA Research (UK) is hiring for various roles (@davidad) Fundraising/investing opportunities Nat Friedman is "interested in funding early stage startups building evals for AI capabilities" A curated deal flow network for deep tech startups: "We're looking for A+ deep tech operator-angels. E.g. founders & CxOs at $1b+ deep tech companies, past and present. Robotics, biotech, defense, etc. Who should we talk to?" (@lpolovets) Policy opportunities "In 2024 I will be putting together a nuclear power working group for NYC/NYS. If you understand the government (or want to learn), want to act productively, and want to look at nuclear policy in the state, this is for you!" (@danielgolliher) Gene editing opportunities "I'm tired of waiting forever for a cure for red-green colorblindness. Reply to this tweet if you'd be willing to travel to an offshore location to receive unapproved (but obviously safe) gene therapy to fix it. If I get enough takers I'll find us a mad scientist to administer the therapy. This has already been done in monkeys (14 years ago) using human genes and a viral vector that is already used in eyes in hu...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Progress links digest, 2023-11-24: Bottlenecks of aging, Starship launches, and much more, published by jasoncrawford on November 25, 2023 on LessWrong. I swear I will get back to doing these weekly so they're not so damn long. As always, feel free to skim and skip around! The Progress Forum A paradox at the heart of American bureaucracy: "The quickest way to doom a project to be over-budget and long-delayed is to make it an urgent public priority" Why Governments Can't be Trusted to Protect the Long-run Future: "No one in the long-run future gets to vote in the next election. No one in government today will gain anything if they make the world better 50 years from now or lose anything if they make it worse" What if we split the US into city-states? "In The Republic, when his entourage asks the ideal size of a state, Socrates replies, 'I would allow the state to increase so far as is consistent with unity; that, I think, is the proper limit'" The Art of Medical Progress: "These two paintings offer a hopeful contrast. Whereas we begin with pain and suffering, we move to hope and progress. The surgeon stands apart as a hero, a symbol of the triumphant conquering of nature by humanity" More from Roots of Progress fellows Bottlenecks of Aging, a "philanthropic menu" of initiatives that "could meaningfully accelerate the advancement of aging science and other life-extending technologies." Fellows Alex Telford and Raiany Romanni both contributed to this (via @jamesfickel) Drought is a policy choice: "California has surrendered to drought, presupposing that with climate change water shortages are inevitable. In response, the state fallows millions of farmland each year. But this is ignorant of California's history of taming arid lands" Geoengineering Now! "Solar geoengineering can offset every degree of anthropogenic temperature rise for single-digit billions of dollars" (by @MTabarrok) A conversation with Richard Bruns on indoor air quality (and some very feasible ways to improve it) (@finmoorhouse) To Become a World-Class Chipmaker, the United States Might Need Help (NYT) covers a recent immigration proposal co-authored by (@cojobrien). Also, thread from @cojobrien of "what I've written through this program and some of my favorite pieces from other ROP colleagues" Opportunities Job opportunities Forest Neurotech is hiring, "one of the coolest projects in the world" says @elidourado "Know someone who loves to scale and automate workflows in the lab? We want to apply new tools to onboard a diverse array of species in the lab!" (@seemaychou) The Navigation Fund (new philanthropic foundation) is hiring an Open Science Program Officer (via @seemaychou, @AGamick) ARIA Research (UK) is hiring for various roles (@davidad) Fundraising/investing opportunities Nat Friedman is "interested in funding early stage startups building evals for AI capabilities" A curated deal flow network for deep tech startups: "We're looking for A+ deep tech operator-angels. E.g. founders & CxOs at $1b+ deep tech companies, past and present. Robotics, biotech, defense, etc. Who should we talk to?" (@lpolovets) Policy opportunities "In 2024 I will be putting together a nuclear power working group for NYC/NYS. If you understand the government (or want to learn), want to act productively, and want to look at nuclear policy in the state, this is for you!" (@danielgolliher) Gene editing opportunities "I'm tired of waiting forever for a cure for red-green colorblindness. Reply to this tweet if you'd be willing to travel to an offshore location to receive unapproved (but obviously safe) gene therapy to fix it. If I get enough takers I'll find us a mad scientist to administer the therapy. This has already been done in monkeys (14 years ago) using human genes and a viral vector that is already used in eyes in hu...

Good Day and welcome to IAQ Radio+ episode 715 this week we welcome Dr. Gigi Kwik Gronvall, and Dr. Richard Bruns to discuss the recently developed Model State Indoor Air Quality Act. Gigi Kwik Gronvall, PhD During the COVID-19 pandemic, she led the Center's ongoing efforts to track the development and marketing of molecular and antigen tests and serology tests, as well as the development of national strategies for COVID-19 serology (antibody) tests and SARS-CoV-2 serosurveys in the United States. She leads work on improving indoor air quality to reduce pathogen transmission, including guidance for K-12 schools, and is a public health advisor to the Baltimore City Public School system. She also has written about the scientific response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the contested origin of SARS-CoV-2, and the implications for national and international security. Dr. Gronvall is the author of Synthetic Biology: Safety, Security, and Promise. In the book, she describes what can be done to minimize technical and social risks and maximize the benefits of synthetic biology, focusing on biosecurity, biosafety, ethics, and US national competitiveness—important sectors of national security. Dr. Gronvall is also the author of Preparing for Bioterrorism: The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Leadership in Biosecurity. Through her description of major grants that represented the foundation's investments in civilian preparedness, public health law, law enforcement, air filtering in buildings, influenza preparedness, and business preparedness, she constructed, for a nontechnical audience, a chronicle of early gains in US efforts to confront the threat of bioterrorism. Dr. Gronvall is a member of the Department of State's International Security Advisory Board, which provides advice about arms control, disarmament, nonproliferation, and national security aspects of emerging technologies. She is a member of the Novel and Exceptional Technology and Research Advisory Committee (NExTRAC), which provides recommendations to the Director of the National Institutes of Health and is a public forum for the discussion of the scientific, safety, and ethical issues associated with emerging biotechnologies. As of 2023, she is a member of the National Academies' Forum on Microbial Threats. From 2010 to 2020, Dr. Gronvall was a member of the Threat Reduction Advisory Committee, which provided the Secretary of Defense with independent advice and recommendations on reducing the risk to the United States, its military forces, and its allies and partners posed by nuclear, biological, chemical, and conventional threats. During 2014-2015, she led a preparatory group that examined the US government response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa as a case study for the Department of Defense's strategic role in health security and made recommendations for future Department of Defense actions in response to disease outbreaks. She served as the Science Advisor for the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism from April 2009 until the Commission ended in February 2010. She has testified before Congress about the safety and security of high-containment biological laboratories in the United States and served on several task forces related to laboratory and pathogen security. Dr. Gronvall has investigated and presented policy recommendations on the governance of science to the Biological Weapons Convention in Geneva, Switzerland. In addition to being a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Dr. Gronvall is an Associate Editor of the journal Health Security (formerly Biosecurity and Bioterrorism). She is a founding member of the Center. Prior to joining the faculty, she worked at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies. She was a National Research Council Postdoctoral Associate at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Dr. Gronvall received a PhD from Johns Hopkins University for work on T-cell receptor/MHC I interactions and worked as a protein chemist at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. She received a BS in biology from Indiana University, Bloomington. Richard Bruns, PhD PhD Clemson University 2012 MS Clemson University 2009 BS Western Carolina University 2004 Particular research interests are using cost-benefit analysis to make the world's preparations for pandemics and emerging biological risks as effective as possible; and expanding the use of QALYs to better measure a variety of life states and social conditions, so that cost-benefit analysis can include and properly account for all expected side effects of public policies. Previously, Richard was a Senior Economist at the Food and Drug Administration, doing cost-benefit modeling of many FDA regulations and actions, including the Intentional Adulteration rule designed to harden food production facilities against terrorist attacks, the PHO GRAS determination aka ‘trans fat ban', and a variety of other rules relating to food and medical devices. Richard also did preliminary modeling on FDA's upcoming Nicotine Product Standard, a de facto ban on cigarettes that would cause many significant effects on public health and safety, as well as research to quantify and monetize the marginal per-unit effects of a variety of food contaminants, such as mycological toxins and arsenic in rice.

Dr Richard Bruns is a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, and before that was a Senior Economist at the US Food and Drug Administration (the FDA). In this episode we talk about the importance of indoor air quality (IAQ), and how to improve it. Including: Estimating the DALY cost of unclean indoor air from pathogens and particulate matter How much pandemic risk could be reduced from improving IAQ? How economists convert health losses into dollar figures — and how not to put a price on life Key interventions to improve IAQ Air filtration Germicidal UV light (especially Far-UVC light) Barriers to adoption, including UV smog and empirical studies needed most National and state-level policy changes to get these interventions adopted widely You can get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us an honest review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

Read the full transcript here. How bad is the air quality in the US and around the world? What's the evidence that certain kinds of particles in the air lead to negative health outcomes? Are there differences in air quality among urban, suburban, and rural areas? And if so, then to what extent are negative health outcomes attributable to air quality rather than to (e.g.) poverty, education, or other confounding factors? What are "PM 2.5" particles? Can some particles be too small to matter? Are all particles of a certain size harmful, or only specific types of particles? Do damaging particles accumulate in the body over time? What can the average person do to reduce their exposure to unhealthy air? Opening windows in our homes can let in fresh air, but it can also let in harmful particles; so is opening windows a good idea or not? How relatively bad are trans fats and saturated fats? Does the FDA regulate drugs too much or not enough? Why do side effect labels usually list all possible side effects without any indication of how common those side effects are? What should a bureacracy be and not be? How can bureacracies train employees to follow rules and produce consistent outcomes without stifling individual initiative and creativity?Richard Bruns is an economist who specializes in cost-benefit analysis of novel public health policy. He is currently a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, which is an Open-Philanthropy-funded think tank devoted to protecting the world from catastrophic biological risks. For the past few years, much of his work has been focused on how indoor air quality improvements can protect us from disease. Before that, he was an economist in the food part of the Food and Drug Administration. Feel free to email him at bruns@jhu.edu about any topic in this episode, or learn more about him at his website. [Read more]

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Air Safety to Combat Global Catastrophic Biorisks [REVISED], published by Gavriel Kleinwaks on May 3, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This report is a collaboration between researchers from 1Day Sooner and Rethink Priorities. Overview This post is a revision of a report previously published on how improvements in indoor air quality can address global catastrophic risk from pandemics. After feedback from expert reviewers, we revised the report in accordance with comments. The comments greatly improved the report and we consider the earlier version to be misphrased, misleading, or mathematically underspecified in several places, but we are leaving the post available to illustrate the revision process. Unlike in the previous post, we are not including the full report, given its length. Instead, this post contains a summary of the reviews and of the report, with a link to the full report. Many thanks to the expert reviewers (listed below) for their detailed feedback. Additional thanks to Rachel Shu for research and writing assistance. We also received help and feedback from many other people over the course of this process—a full list is in the “Acknowledgements” section of the report. Summary of Expert Review We asked biosecurity and indoor air quality experts to review this report: Dr. Richard Bruns of the John Hopkins Center for Health Security, Dr. Jacob Bueno de Mesquita and Dr. Alexandra Johnson of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Dr. David Manheim of ALTER, and Professor Shelly Miller of the University of Colorado. These experts suggested a variety of both minor and substantive changes to the document, though these changes do not alter the overall conclusion of the report that indoor air safety is an important lever for reducing GCBRs and that there are several high-leverage funding opportunities around promoting indoor air quality and specific air cleaning interventions. The main changes suggested were: Providing confidence intervals on key estimates, such as our estimate of the overall impact of IAQ interventions, and reframing certain estimates to improve clarity. Modifying the phrasing around the section concerning ‘modelling', to better clarify our position around the specific limitations of existing models (specifically that there aren't models that move from the room and building-level transmission to population-level transmission). Clarifying the distinction between mechanical interventions, specific in-duct vs upper-room systems (254nm) and HVAC-filtration vs portable air cleaners and adding additional information about some interactions between different intervention types Adding general public advocacy for indoor air quality as a funding opportunity and related research that could be done support advocacy efforts. Adding additional relevant literature and more minor details regarding indoor air quality across different sections. Improving the overall readability of the report, by removing repetitive elements. Report Executive Summary (Full report available here.) Top-line summary Most efforts to address indoor air quality (IAQ) do not address airborne pathogen levels, and creating indoor air quality standards that include airborne pathogen levels could meaningfully reduce global catastrophic biorisk from pandemics. We estimate that an ideal adoption of indoor air quality interventions, like ventilation, filtration, and ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (GUV) in all public buildings in the US, would reduce overall population transmission of respiratory illnesses by 30-75%, with a median estimate of 52.5%. Bottlenecks inhibiting the mass deployment of these technologies include a lack of clear standards, cost of implementation, and difficulty changing regulation/public attitudes. The following actions can accelerate deployment and improve IAQ to red...

Richard Bruns is an economist who worked on cost-benefit for the FDA and now works at a biosecurity organization funded by the Open Philanthropy Foundation.Tyler Cowen on From the New WorldZvi Mowshowitz on FTNW:Scott Alexander on the FDA This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cactus.substack.com

Charles Schmid, Jr. was a narcissistic young man living in Tucson, Arizona in the early 1960's. He had fantasies of becoming a rockstar. He wanted to see what it was like to kill and if he could murder and get away with it. At least three girls were brutally murdered by him before his bragging of the killings and showing friends the bodies eventually got him caught. For exclusive episodes and content, click here If you like us, FOLLOW us!Twitter: @TnTcrimes Instagram: @TnTcrimes Facebook: @TnTcrimesVISIT US AT:www.TNTcrimes.comwww.TNTcrimes.com/members/www.Patreon.com/tntcrimesYouTube: TnT: Crimes & ConsequencesSOURCES FOR EPISODE: Life Magazine ArticleCold Blooded by John GilmoreI, Squealer by Richard Bruns

The year was 1965. The Beatles, Elvis Presley, and The Righteous Brothers filled the airwaves. Television shows like "The Adventures of Ozzy and Harriett" and "The Andy Griffith Show" mirrored the innocence of life in the dusty city of Tucson, Az. But the sunbaked desert surrounding Tucson was hiding a sinister secret. A psychopath names Charles Schmid, later nicknamed the "Pied Piper of Tucson" by Life Magazine, would steal that innocence away, along with the lives of three beautiful teenage girls.In this firsthand account written in 1967, Richard Bruns shares the evolution of his friendship with Schmid, the details of getting involved way in over his head, and how he finally summoned the courage to blow the whistle to end the deadly rampage that shocked the nation and changed the city of Tucson forever. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The year was 1965. The Beatles, Elvis Presley, and The Righteous Brothers filled the airwaves. Television shows like "The Adventures of Ozzy and Harriett" and "The Andy Griffith Show" mirrored the innocence of life in the dusty city of Tucson, Az. But the sunbaked desert surrounding Tucson was hiding a sinister secret. A psychopath names Charles Schmid, later nicknamed the "Pied Piper of Tucson" by Life Magazine, would steal that innocence away, along with the lives of three beautiful teenage girls.In this firsthand account written in 1967, Richard Bruns shares the evolution of his friendship with Schmid, the details of getting involved way in over his head, and how he finally summoned the courage to blow the whistle to end the deadly rampage that shocked the nation and changed the city of Tucson forever. I, A SQUEALER: The Insider's Account of the Pied Piper of Tucson Murders-Lisa Espich

Fifty years after the brutal murders of three Tucson women, an inside account of killer Charles Schmid, aka "The Pied Piper of Tucson" is published -  written by Schmid's former friend Richard Bruns not long after the tragic and terrible events.  The author's daughter, Lisa Espich joins the Most Notorious podcast to share the fascinating details from her father's book, called "I, a Squealer: The Insider's Account of the Pied Piper of Tucson Murders".  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices